中 EN
Sign In Register

Academic Intelligence · Curated Daily

Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

AcademicHub aggregates real-time literature from top journals and preprint platforms. Build your personal research radar and let large language models compile cross-disciplinary analysis briefings automatically.

Sign In Register
01.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-19

HTS-Oracle v2: Prospective AI-Guided Discovery and Experimental Validation of Small Molecule Modulators Across Multiple Targets

Authors:
Abdel-Rahman↗Gabr↗

High-throughput screening (HTS) remains the cornerstone of early-phase small molecule discovery yet consistently underperforms against immunotherapy targets, yielding validated hit rates below 0.1%. Here we introduce HTS-Oracle v2, which features rigorous cross-validation that ensures honest performance estimates. HTS-Oracle v2 was trained and validated across four clinically significant immune checkpoint targets (CD28, ICOS, LAG-3, and TIGIT) achieving ROC-AUC values of 0.968, 0.969, 0.875, 0.928 respectively under rigorous cross-validation. For prospective experimental validation, HTS-Oracle v2 was applied to an 8,960-compound Enamine Protein Mimetic Library, selecting only 25 compounds per target for experimental testing using temperature-related intensity change (TRIC) technology, a 99.7% reduction in screening burden. HTS-Oracle v2 identified 4, 5, 4, and 6 validated binders from 25 prospectively selected compounds per target, corresponding to validated hit rates of 16%, 20%, 16%, and 24%, respectively. Notably, 67-80% of all experimentally confirmed hits across the full 8,960-compound library were captured within just 25 model-selected compounds per target. For CD28, this represents a 28-fold improvement over HTS-Oracle v1 (239x versus 8.4x), establishing HTS-Oracle v2 as an efficient platform for AI-guided prospective hit discovery across immunotherapy targets.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

A Multi-Modal Sensor Fusion Instrument for Measuring Regional Human Mobility: The Distributed Human Data Engine (DHDE)

Authors:
Amil Khanzada↗Takuji Takemoto↗

arXiv:2603.21639v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Accurately estimating human mobility in peripheral regional economies presents a fundamental measurement challenge: physical ground-truth sensors are sparse, behavioral intent signals are heterogeneous, and environmental friction introduces systematic bias into demand inference. We introduce the Distributed Human Data Engine (DHDE), a multi-modal sensor fusion architecture that addresses this challenge by integrating physical instrumentation (Edge-AI cameras), digital intent signals (route search impression metrics), behavioral records (90,350 spending records, 97,719 standardized survey responses), and meteorological data across four geographically distributed nodes in Fukui, Japan. The primary measurement-science contribution is the design, deployment, and cross-node validation of the DHDE as a sparse-sensor compensation instrument: a heterogeneous sensor fusion architecture that anchors non-stationary digital intent signals to concurrent physical ground-truth counts, correcting for systematic bias introduced by meteorological planning friction. The instrument is implemented as an ensemble inference pipeline (Random Forest and Ordinary Least Squares with Newey-West robust inference), calibrated across 397 daily observations and validated by chronological holdout replication across four geographically distinct node types. The primary OLS specification achieved an in-sample explanatory power of R2 = 0.810 and a chronological out-of-sample predictive performance of R2 = 0.683. Results identify an Under-Vibrancy Paradox where macro-regional visitor satisfaction correlates positively with crowd density (Spearman rank correlation rs = +0.150, p = 0.002). We estimate an annual proxy gap of 865,917 intent-implied visits, corresponding to JPY 11.96 billion (USD 72.6 million) in foregone revenue.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
03.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-16

scIsoAgent enables autonomous isoform-resolved characterization and sequence-informed interpretation of long-read single-cell transcriptomes

Authors:
Zhao↗Liu↗Li↗Xu↗Wang↗

Alternative isoform usage can alter gene function independently of total gene expression, creating a need to resolve transcript isoforms at single-cell resolution. Long-read single-cell RNA sequencing meets this need by linking cellular identity to transcript isoforms and sequence-level features. Realizing its full biological value requires reproducible workflows that connect specialized long-read analysis with biological interpretation. Existing large language model (LLM)-based biomedical agents support general omics analysis, but are not designed for isoform-resolved long-read single-cell workflows. Here, we present scIsoAgent, an autonomous LLM-powered scientific agent for long-read single-cell RNA-seq analysis. scIsoAgent turns heterogeneous long-read single-cell inputs into traceable isoform-resolved workflows, using stage-aware planning and persistent computational context to support both execution and interpretation. Across complementary evaluations, this design improved the continuity from analysis planning to executable, interactive workflows compared with general-purpose LLM baselines. In real-data reanalysis, scIsoAgent recovered major findings from published long-read single-cell resources and extended a representative differential transcript usage event into a sequence-informed functional hypothesis. By linking full-length isoform sequences with model-inferred transcript properties, scIsoAgent connects observed isoform usage with potential sequence-level functional consequences. These results demonstrate that autonomous scientific agents can transform fragmented long-read single-cell analysis into coherent, reproducible workflows for isoform-resolved discovery and biological interpretation.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

OnDeFog: Online Decision Transformer under Frame Dropping

Authors:
Daiki Yotsufuji↗Kenta Nishihara↗Shoma Shimizu↗Kento Uchida↗Shinichi Shirakawa↗

arXiv:2606.19721v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In challenging real-world reinforcement learning applications, communication delays or sensor failures often cause frame dropping, in which the agent cannot receive the dropped states and associated rewards. To address the performance degradation caused by frame dropping, the Decision Transformer under Random Frame Dropping (DeFog) was developed by incorporating additional mechanisms into the decision transformer to tackle frame dropping. Although DeFog can mitigate performance degradation in frame-dropping environments, since DeFog is an offline learning method, it struggles to effectively generalize to novel states not adequately represented in the training dataset. In this study, we propose OnDeFog, which integrates the mechanisms in DeFog with the online decision transformer (ODT), an online reinforcement learning method that learns policies through direct environmental interaction. Comprehensive experimental evaluation demonstrates that our proposed OnDeFog achieves superior performance compared to ODT in environments characterized by high dropping frame rate and outperforms DeFog on datasets containing a large amount of low-reward data.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

JustDiag!: A Diagnostic Justification Engine for Accountable Root Cause Analysis

Authors:
Tingzhu Bi↗Xinrui Jiang↗Xun Zhang↗Pengcheng Su↗Congjie He↗Jinglin Li↗Ping Wang↗Meng Ma↗

arXiv:2606.19407v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models can produce fluent root cause analyses, but fluent final answers alone are insufficient evidence for accountability in high-stakes operations. In real incident response, engineers need to know what evidence supported a diagnosis, which alternatives were considered, where contradictions remained, and whether the system resolved the case or preserved uncertainty. We address this gap with JustDiag, a diagnostic justification engine for RCA that maintains an explicit process state over evidence, findings, competing hypotheses, conflicts, and next checks. We evaluated the system on 66 real-world incidents using a two-layer protocol that separately scores final-answer quality and process quality. Relative to a matched control without diagnostic justification, JustDiag achieved stronger outcome and process scores, while accepting slightly lower terminal completion due to more calibrated non-closure. These results suggest that accountable RCA requires explicit diagnostic justification artifacts and process-aware evaluation, not only fluent final answers.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
06.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Neural Variability Enhances Artificial Network Robustness

Authors:
Robin Preble↗Praveen Venkatesh↗Stefan Mihalas↗Kameron Decker Harris↗

arXiv:2606.13801v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neural responses in cortex exhibit substantial trial-to-trial variability in response to repeated stimuli, while peripheral sensory neurons respond far more consistently, leading many to wonder whether stochasticity may carry meaning. Existing work has argued that noise and signal correlations may be optimized for discrimination in animals, whereas artificial neural network (ANN) studies have shown similar benefits of noise in machine learning tasks, although most ANN work has neglected the effects of correlations. Here we investigate whether correlated noise improves the robustness of artificial neural networks to adversarial attacks and naturalistic image modifications. Using the covariance of activations under modified versus clean inputs, we find that structured noise may significantly improve network robustness. Robustness to naturalistic image modifications benefits most from structure, but this structure transfers poorly across modification types. In contrast, noise structure from adversarial attacks can generalize to other kinds of attacks. These results suggest that structured noise in ANN activations generally improves robustness, establishing a biologically plausible strategy for creating robust artificial neural networks that only relies on local information.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

The Tao of Agency: Autotelic AI, Embedded Agency and Dissolution of the Self

Authors:
Aritra Sarkar↗

arXiv:2606.19924v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Most artificial intelligence systems are built on the assumption that goals are exogenous and specified by the designer. Exploring what happens when an agent begins generating its own goals opens the field of autotelic AI. Agents are expected not merely to pursue objectives but to discover them. In this article, we trace its consequences through intrinsic motivation, resource-driven priors, causal-interventional learning, homeostasis, and embeddedness; the last of which is found to be a necessary but not sufficient condition for autotelic agency. Embeddedness individuates the agent at the cost of revealing that the individuation is non-unique, such that the same dynamics admit many valid partitions, each defining a different candidate self. The deepest problem with autotelic AI is therefore not how the agent generates goals, but how it generates and relativizes the self to which the goals are assigned. The agent must believe in its own boundary in order to act, and see through that boundary in order to understand. We consolidate these developments into a single framework and extend it along three directions: a quantum formulation in which the agent-environment cut becomes physical, a philosophical reading against non-dual contemplative traditions, and a concrete LLM-based agentic instantiation.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
08.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

On the Poisson Follower Model

Authors:
Natasa Dragovic↗Francois Baccelli↗

arXiv:2309.04864v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce a stochastic geometry dynamics inspired by opinion dynamics that captures the essence of modern asymmetric social networks with leaders and followers. Points in the Euclidean space represent opinions, and the leader of an agent is the one with the closest opinion. In this dynamics, each follower updates its opinion by halving the distance to its leader. We demonstrate that this simple dynamics and its iterations exhibit several interesting purely geometric phenomena related to the evolution of leadership and opinion clusters, which resemble those observed in social networks. We also show that when the initial opinions are randomly distributed as a stationary Poisson point process, the spatial frequency of each of these phenomena can be expressed through an integral geometry formula involving semi-algebraic domains. Finally, we analyze numerically the limiting behavior of this follower dynamics. In the Poisson case, the agents fall into two categories: ultimate followers, who continue updating their opinions indefinitely, and ultimate leaders, who adopt a fixed opinion after a finite time. Spatial discrete event simulations support all our findings.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

One Polluted Page Is Enough: Evaluating Web Content Pollution in Generative Recommenders

Authors:
Minghao Luo↗Liang Chen↗

Search-augmented LLMs increasingly mediate everyday consumer recommendations by retrieving live web content. This creates a new risk: generative recommenders may consume polluted web content, such as fake reviews and promotional pages crafted to mislead recommendations. We ask: to what extent do search-augmented LLMs become unwitting promoters of fake products when consuming polluted retrieval results? To answer this, we introduce FORGE (Fake Online Recommendations in Generative Environments), a benchmark for measuring fake-product promotion under controlled web-content pollution. Given an upstream search result, FORGE locally rewrites real products in retrieved web pages into fake ones to simulate web-content pollution, and measures how often the LLM recommends the fake product. FORGE covers 225 real-world products across 15 categories and 5 consumer scenarios. Across 12 commercial and open-weights LLMs, all models are vulnerable: a single polluted page yields fooled rates of up to 27%, while the full top-3 replacement raises this to 73.8%. Vulnerability varies substantially across categories, increasing when models lack stable prior knowledge of the relevant products. Reasoning does not mitigate this vulnerability; instead, it often generates spurious social proof to justify false recommendations. We evaluate three defenses: skepticism prompting and consensus filtering (over model priors or cross-document evidence). Skepticism can exacerbate vulnerability, much like reasoning, while filtering risks suppressing legitimate products. We release FORGE at https://github.com/leoluolol/forge-benchmark.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
10.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-19

Tox21mer, A transformer foundation model for Tox21 high-throughput concentration-response curves data

Authors:
Li↗Hwang↗Shockley↗Motsinger-Reif↗Hsieh↗J.-H↗Auerbach↗S. S↗Reif↗

The U.S. Tox21 collaboration has generated a large reference library of high-throughput concentration-response assays. Here we present Tox21mer, a 43.5-million-parameter transformer that encodes each Tox21 concentration-response curve together with assay metadata into a 768-dimensional representation. Tox21mer was pretrained on ~2.5 million curves from 102 assay protocols and 6,727 compounds using masked-response reconstruction as the primary objective, with low-weight auxiliary supervision on assay outcome and AC50. To evaluate the learned representation, we trained lightweight probes on frozen embeddings from concentration-response curves of held-out compounds. The representation supported a macro-F1 of 0.985 for three-class outcome prediction (agonist, antagonist, inactive), a binary F1 of 0.994 for active/inactive prediction, and an R2 of 0.87 for log10(AC50). The learned embeddings formed coherent groupings by curve-class category. A masked-only pretraining variant retained near-baseline probe performance, indicating that the representation is learned largely from the self-supervised objective rather than from auxiliary labels. Ablation analyses further showed that predictive performance depends mainly on curve-level response-value distributions conditioned on assay context, with limited reliance on detailed within-curve ordering. Tox21mer thus provides a reusable foundation representation for Tox21 concentration-response data that can support extrapolation to untested compounds through integration with chemical features or distillation into chemistry-only student models for large-scale external screening.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Direct Advantage Estimation for Scalable and Sample-efficient Deep Reinforcement Learning

Authors:
Hsiao-Ru Pan↗Bernhard Sch\"olkopf↗

arXiv:2606.20411v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Direct Advantage Estimation (DAE) has been shown to improve the sample efficiency of deep reinforcement learning algorithms. However, its reliance on full environment observability limits its applicability in realistic settings, and its requirement to model transition probabilities incurs substantial computational overhead for high-dimensional observations. In the present work, we address both limitations. First, we extend the theoretical framework of DAE to partially observable domains with minimal modifications. Second, we reduce its computational complexity by introducing discrete latent dynamics models that efficiently approximate transition probabilities. We evaluate our approach on the Arcade Learning Environment and find that DAE scales effectively with function approximator capacity while retaining high sample efficiency.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

LEAP: Layer-skipping Efficiency via Adaptive Progression for Vision Transformer Distillation

Authors:
Jiaqi Zhang↗Ashton Lee↗Anthony Wong↗John Zou↗Sami BuGhanem↗Randall Balestriero↗

Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) with Vision Transformer (ViT) backbones, such as DINOv2, have become essential for downstream tasks like object recognition and semantic segmentation. The immense computational requirements of backbones often necessitate distillation into smaller architectures for edge deployment. Feature-based knowledge distillation (KD) often suffers from the teacher-student gap; the student struggles to imitate teacher's complex feature map due to its limited capacity. To mitigate this bottleneck, we propose LEAP: Layer-skipping Efficiency via Adaptive Progression, a training curriculum for ViT feature-based knowledge distillation. By utilizing the teacher's intermediate feature maps as a sequence of progressively more difficult targets, our curriculum allows the student to build a foundational representation before tackling higher-level abstractions. Our results demonstrate that this paradigm significantly accelerates convergence through adaptive difficulty selection across various student model sizes and dataset scales. With our curriculum, the LEAP-distilled ViT-S achieves 90.1% accuracy on ImageNet-100, a +12.24% improvement compared with baseline. On ImageNet-1K, LEAP achieves +3.84% and +7.75% improvement for the instance retrieval task on the Oxford and Paris datasets, respectively. Furthermore, the curriculum enables 25.1% savings in training FLOPs and 21% savings in training time on ImageNet-100 by implementing early-stopping for teacher inference during the initial stages of training. Code is available at https://github.com/KevinZ0217/LEAP

Read & Discuss → View Source →
13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

A Perception vs. Distortion Perspective on Score-Based Generative Channel Estimation

Authors:
Marco Skocaj↗Lukas Eller↗Mate Boban↗

arXiv:2606.16815v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Driven by their remarkable success in computer vision and inverse problem solving, score-based models are increasingly applied to wireless communications, where they show promise across a range of physical-layer tasks. However, despite this growing interest, the current literature often lacks a rigorous analysis of when score-matching offers a tangible advantage over traditional discriminative learning. This paper aims to address this gap through the use-case of channel estimation, a fundamental inverse problem in wireless systems. We present a theoretically grounded interpretation of score-based channel estimation through the lens of the perception-distortion tradeoff, identifying the conditions where score matching excels as well as its key limitations. In particular, by modeling downstream wireless tasks (e.g., capacity maximization) as functionals of the channel estimation process, we quantify the excess risk incurred by standard distortion-minimization approaches. Extensive numerical results show that under high predictive uncertainty, the large excess risk gap can be offset by score-based estimation, enabling near Bayesian-optimal precoding via the learned posterior, whereas in the low predictive uncertainty regime, discriminative distortion-minimization approaches are preferable due to lower complexity and more efficient use of model capacity.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
15.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

High burden of subclinical TB in Africa revealed from a postmortem cohort.

Authors:
Ahimbisibwe↗NAKIBUULE↗Ssejjoba↗M. M↗Lekuya↗Kizito↗A. M↗Cose↗Mulwana↗Bisoboka↗C. P↗Turyasingura↗…

Tuberculosis (TB) is increasingly recognised as a spectrum of infection and disease, yet the prevalence of viable, asymptomatic Mycobacterium tuberculosis (M.tb) infection remains uncertain. Subclinical Tuberculosis (scTB), defined as microbiologically confirmed M.tb infection in the absence of recognised symptoms, is under detected by symptom, sputum and imaging-based approaches. We conducted postmortem examinations of 94 adults who died from non-infectious causes, none of whom were clinically suspected of TB or reported TB related symptoms prior to death. Lung and extrapulmonary tissues were cultured for M.tb. Viable M.tb was confirmed in six individuals, corresponding to a prevalence of 6.4% (95% CI: 2.4 to 13.4%). These findings provide direct tissue-based evidence that viable, asymptomatic M.tb infection can persist beyond the reach of conventional clinical detection. Our data suggest that a biologically active reservoir of infection may exist undetected within high-burden settings, with implications for surveillance strategies aimed at TB elimination.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
16.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Signed Compression Progress on a Sealed Audit is Goodhart-Resistant

Authors:
Ayush Mittal↗Dhruv Gupta↗

arXiv:2606.11417v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Compression progress is a long-standing proposal for intrinsic motivation: reward an agent when its world model becomes better at predicting or compressing experience. The folk claim is that this reward is "credible" because it is paid only for learning. We make this precise and prove it. If intrinsic reward is the signed decrease of a fixed sealed-audit loss, r_t = E(theta_{t-1}) - E(theta_t), then cumulative reward telescopes exactly to endpoint audit improvement, so no policy can push reward up indefinitely while true audit performance stagnates or degrades. For finite audit panels the same result holds with a sharp false-positive budget: cumulative empirical reward is at most true audit improvement plus 2 Delta_n(F, delta), the uniform audit deviation of the model class. This is horizon-free: adaptivity over time costs nothing once the sealed panel uniformly controls the class. The theorem also identifies the failure modes: the guarantee disappears if progress is clipped, scored on the agent's own stream, exposed to a high-capacity model on a reusable panel, or applied to a neural class that makes Delta_n vacuous. We give a Lean 4 mechanization of the structural core (telescoping, the finite-audit bound, finite Gibbs, and the entropy floor) and an experiment suite on ARC-TGI grid-transformation generators with adaptive holdout attacks. Experiments confirm the theory: finite-audit deviation scales as n^{-0.527}; signed progress resists clip-farming, stream leakage, and noisy-TV curiosity; naive reusable audits are exploitable by black-box scalar feedback, while standard release defenses keep the attack below the 2 Delta_n threshold. Signed compression progress on a sealed audit is an accounting signal of genuine improvement.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Pepti-Agent: An AI Agent for Peptide Design and Optimization

Authors:
Houxu Chen↗Achuth Chandrasekhar↗Amir Barati Farimani↗

Therapeutic peptides occupy a valuable design space between small molecules and biologics, but their development requires satisfying several competing constraints at once: solubility, hemolytic activity, and nonspecific surface fouling are governed by overlapping sequence features, so improving one property often degrades another. Computational design addresses this by pairing generative models with sequence-based property predictors, iteratively proposing and refining candidates. However, these components are typically wired together as monolithic scripts that are difficult to inspect, extend, or reuse, and they often refine sequences by natural-language reasoning rather than by tracking the evolving multi-property state of each candidate. We present Pepti-Agent, a closed-loop, peptide-specific framework that exposes generation, property prediction, and single-residue mutation as independently inspectable Model Context Protocol (MCP) tools. A large language model controller invokes these tools and consults live predictor output between calls, so refinement is guided by each sequence's current property profile rather than by language reasoning alone. Task-specific PeptideGPT models generate candidates, ProtBERT-based classifiers score solubility, hemolysis, and non-fouling, and two interchangeable mutation operators propose sequence edits. By recording a per-step trace of controller decisions, predictor outputs, and accepted mutations, Pepti-Agent offers a reproducible substrate for benchmarking multi-objective design strategies and for prioritizing candidates for experimental validation.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
18.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

ActMem: Bridging the Gap Between Memory Retrieval and Reasoning in LLM Agents

Authors:
Xiaohui Zhang↗Zequn Sun↗Chengyuan Yang↗Yaqin Jin↗Yazhong Zhang↗Wei Hu↗

Memory management is essential for LLM agents in long-term interactions. Current memory frameworks typically treat agents as passive ``recorders'' and retrieve information without understanding its deeper implications. They may fail in scenarios requiring reasoning and complex decision-making. To bridge this critical gap, we propose a novel actionable memory framework called ActMem that integrates memory retrieval with active causal reasoning. ActMem transforms unstructured dialogue history into a structured causal and semantic graph. By leveraging counterfactual reasoning and commonsense completion, it enables agents to deduce implicit constraints and resolve potential conflicts between past states and current intentions. Furthermore, we introduce a comprehensive dataset ActMemEval to evaluate agent reasoning capabilities in logic-driven scenarios, moving beyond the fact-retrieval focus of existing memory benchmarks. Experiments demonstrate that ActMem significantly outperforms baselines in handling complex, memory-dependent tasks, paving the way for more consistent and reliable intelligent assistants.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Quantum Machine Learning for Industrial Applications

Authors:
L\'eo Monbroussou↗

arXiv:2606.14822v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in Machine Learning have transformed numerous industrial sectors, yet classical paradigms face fundamental limitations: rapidly growing data volumes, rising computational costs, significant energy consumption, and the physical scaling limits of conventional hardware architectures. Quantum computing has emerged as a promising computational paradigm to address these challenges, giving rise to the field of Quantum Machine Learning (QML). In this thesis, the theoretical foundations of QML are investigated, with a focus on near-term and future practical applications. Three central challenges are addressed: the trainability of variational quantum circuits, their expressivity, and their resistance to efficient classical simulation. The trainability of Hamming-weight preserving variational quantum circuits is first studied, and theoretical guarantees are established that resolve an open conjecture on the absence of barren plateaus for this circuit family. Subspace-preserving QML algorithms are then introduced, including photonic circuits and quantum convolutional neural networks, and are designed to mimic classical ML subroutines while offering polynomial quantum advantage. Finally, variational quantum circuits are analyzed as quantum Fourier models, and a framework is derived to jointly characterize expressivity and trainability, from which conditions are obtained under which quantum models provably separate from their classical counterparts. These contributions are intended to advance the theoretical roadmap for harnessing near-term and future quantum technologies in real-world applications.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Corpus Augmentation for Sign Language Translation via LLM-Guided Video Stitching

Authors:
Zsolt Robotka↗\'Ad\'am R\'ak↗Jalal Al-Afandi↗Andr\'as Horv\'ath↗Gy\"orgy Cserey↗

Sign language translation (SLT) converts sign language video into spoken language text and holds significant promise for improving accessibility and enabling communication between signing and non-signing communities. While large weakly-aligned datasets have enabled pre-training at scale and gloss-free methods have reduced reliance on expert annotation, high-quality parallel sign video-text pairs for fine-tuning remain scarce, limiting generalisation on long-tail vocabulary and unseen constructions. We propose a corpus augmentation approach that requires no additional human annotation, external sign-language video corpora, or generative video models, relying only on the existing gloss-annotated training corpus and an LLM for sentence generation: per-gloss clips are extracted from training videos via CTC forced-alignment, novel gloss-sentence pairs are generated by a corpus-anchored LLM, and synthetic sequences are assembled through random sentence sampling and clip assignment. The resulting synthetic RGB video-text pairs are architecture-agnostic at the downstream training stage and can be consumed directly by RGB-based SLT models, or converted into pose or feature representations by pipelines that derive such inputs from video. Sincan et al. re-evaluated five recent gloss-free methods under strictly identical conditions; the largest verified gain over the GFSLT-VLP baseline was only 0.98 BLEU-4. Our augmentation, applied within the same framework, achieves +2.92 BLEU-4 without any change to architecture or training protocol. We further identify that synthetic data harms vision-language pretraining despite improving its objectives, and that optimising clip transitions for visual smoothness is counter-productive under L2-based criteria; we propose that abrupt boundaries may act as a form of implicit regularisation. Code is available at https://github.com/robizso/slt-datagen.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
21.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

fuzzyfold: a high-performance framework for stochastic RNA folding kinetics

Authors:
Badelt↗

The analysis of nucleic acid secondary structures is overwhelmingly dominated by methods that analyze the thermodynamic equilibrium distribution and which ignore all dynamic aspects of nucleic acid folding. Yet, there are numerous popular examples of nucleic acid folding that rely on kinetic models, such as RNA riboswitches or DNA strand displacement systems. Here, I am presenting fuzzyfold, a Rust-based software package for nucleic acid secondary structure analysis with an explicit focus on stochastic modeling. The framework introduces three-way and four-way shift moves with a biophysically motivated rate-model parameterization, and it is developed with an emphasis on both model flexibility and performance, e.g. allowing for the generation of single co-transcriptional trajectories for thousand-nucleotide long RNA molecules in just a few minutes. The main strength of the fuzzyfold package, however, is its focus on user and developer interfaces for long-term development. It provides easily installable command-line interfaces, e.g. for aggregating data from multiple parallel trajectories efficiently into an ensemble-level dynamic analysis. For developers, the code-base supports straight-forward substitution of thermodynamic and kinetic free-energy models, and a flexible library interface with Python bindings, enabling integration of individual components into custom computational workflows.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

CausalMotion: Structured Physical Reasoning as Keyframe and Trajectory Guidance for Training-Free Video Generation

Authors:
Sihan Zhuang↗Xinyuan Chen↗Tianfan Xue↗Yaohui Wang↗

Recent advances in diffusion-based video generation have significantly improved visual quality and short-term temporal coherence. However, existing methods still struggle to produce videos with physically consistent and causally plausible dynamics, especially in scenarios involving long-horizon interactions. This limitation arises from the fact that video diffusion models primarily learn physical consistency implicitly, while vision-language models can directly model physical laws. Based on this idea, in this work, we propose CausalMotion, a training-free framework that injects explicit physical reasoning into video generation through structured intermediate representations. Our key idea is to decouple reasoning from generation by leveraging a vision-language model to decompose a text prompt into a sequence of causally consistent keyframes and object-centric motion trajectories. These representations are then aligned and integrated as soft constraints to guide a pretrained video diffusion model during inference. This design enables explicit modeling of object dynamics and causal transitions without requiring additional training or supervision. Extensive experiments show that our method consistently improves physical plausibility and temporal coherence, particularly in dynamics-intensive scenarios, while maintaining high perceptual video quality.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Orcheo: A Modular Full-Stack Platform for Conversational Search

Authors:
Shaojie Jiang↗Svitlana Vakulenko↗Maarten de Rijke↗

arXiv:2602.14710v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Conversational search (CS) requires a complex software engineering pipeline that integrates query reformulation, ranking, and response generation. CS researchers currently face two barriers: the lack of a unified framework for efficiently sharing contributions with the community, and the difficulty of deploying end-to-end prototypes needed for user evaluation. We introduce Orcheo, an open-source platform designed to bridge this gap. Orcheo offers three key advantages: (i) A modular architecture promotes component reuse through single-file node modules, facilitating sharing and reproducibility in CS research; (ii) Production-ready infrastructure bridges the prototype-to-system gap via dual execution modes, secure credential management, and execution telemetry, with built-in AI coding support that lowers the learning curve; (iii) Starter-kit assets include 45+ off-the-shelf components for query understanding, ranking, and response generation, enabling the rapid bootstrapping of complete CS pipelines. We describe the framework architecture and validate Orcheo's utility through case studies that highlight modularity and ease of use. Orcheo is released as open source under the MIT License at https://github.com/AI-Colleagues/orcheo.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Beyond IGO-Flow: Toward Convergence Analysis of IGO in Continuous Spaces

Authors:
Ryosuke Kimura↗Youhei Akimoto↗

arXiv:2606.17523v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Information-Geometric Optimization (IGO) provides a unified framework for black-box optimization by interpreting the adaptation of a search distribution as a natural gradient update. Despite its conceptual importance, the convergence theory of IGO remains limited: most existing results concern continuous-time idealizations such as the IGO flow, rather than discrete-time updates with non-infinitesimal learning rates. In this paper, we study discrete-time IGO in continuous spaces, formulated as natural gradient updates in the expectation-parameter coordinates of an exponential family. In particular, we analyze IGO over the multivariate Gaussian family on strongly convex quadratic objective functions. Our analysis covers a setting that simultaneously incorporates full covariance adaptation, a fixed positive learning rate, and quantile-based weights. In this setting, we prove that the covariance matrix converges to the zero matrix. We further show that the mean vector converges to the global optimum, provided that the condition number of the appropriately scaled covariance matrix is bounded at sufficiently frequent iterations. These results advance the convergence theory of IGO and help bridge the gap between the mathematical theory of IGO and practical covariance-adaptive search methods such as CMA-ES.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Self-Evolving Visual Questioner

Authors:
Yijun Liang↗Hengguang Zhou↗Ming Li↗Lichen Li↗Cho-Jui Hsieh↗Tianyi Zhou↗

Vision-language models (VLMs) are typically trained as passive answerers, while their ability to actively ask diverse, non-trivial, visual-centric and grounded questions remains underexplored. Existing visual questioners' performance is bottlenecked by the availability of high-quality training data or the cost of curating them. We show that a VLM can continuously improve itself as a visual questioner without any external supervision. We propose a self-evolving framework that uses a VLM itself as both a proposer and a filter to produce harder, more informative, and visual-centric questions, while maintaining their exploration diversity to avoid training collapse. These questions are then used to train the VLM in both questioner and answerer modes. To evaluate the questioner, we introduce an agentic protocol that assesses questions along perception, reasoning, and diversity dimensions. Experiments across various backbone VLMs show that our method substantially enhances the quality and substantially expands the difficulty boundary of autonomous question generation. Under the same budget, our self-supervision is more effective than training on the static source data. Moreover, the self-evolving questioner remains a competitive or even better answerer.

Read & Discuss → View Source →